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Bolivia: The MAS hegemonic project and its tensions

Mike Geddes[1]

The
many actions – and inactions – of the MAS government continue to inspire a
torrent of debate, both critical and supportive. In this context, it is worth asking to what
extent the MAS came into government in 2005 with a clearly defined (counter)
hegemonic project, and if so how has this programme developed since?

Certainly,
the Vice-President, Alvaro Garcia Linera, who has spoken and written
extensively in Gramscian terms about what the MAS government is trying to
achieve and both the successes he would claim and the problems encountered,
presents a picture of a clearly defined project. From his position as
Vice-President, without departmental responsibilities, Garcia Linera plays a
critical role in enunciating strategic perspectives and mediating between
different tendencies within the government – indigenist, socialist, populist. While of course he has his own views, his analysis
can perhaps be seen as broadly reflective of the MAS government’s project.

Garcia
Linera grounds his analysis in the crisis of the neoliberal Bolivian state in
the period from around 2000, and the shift by the MAS to move from localized to
general mobilization and build a popular bloc capable of sustaining a new
popular consensus to ‘refound’ the state. While the MAS came to power on the
back of a mass popular movement, it still faced serious opposition from right
wing forces, allied to large scale capitalist agribusiness, in Bolivia’s eastern
provinces. Spatial socioeconomic factors have thus been a key element in MAS
strategy.

In
Garcia Linera’s analysis, the MAS deployed an ‘encircling strategy’ against
this opposition, ‘using both the coercive mechanisms of the state and social mobilisation’.[2]
The defeat of the ‘regionalised right’ and an alignment with the
indigenous-popular axis of social sectors, including middle classes and small
and medium sized business interests, were confirmed by a presidential recall
referendum in which Morales increased his vote from 54% to 67%. Nonetheless,
Garcia Linera argues, while the right has – for now at any rate – lost
political power nationally, and has no alternative political project for
society capable of gaining national support, it retains very significant economic
power rooted in the agrarian, commercial and financial sectors and a consequent
ability to block change in some areas.[3]

The
defeat of the right paved the way for the new constitution, drafted by a
broadly based constituent assembly and ratified by a national referendum. This,
in principle at any rate, and despite significant concessions, entrenches a
range of rights and guarantees, especially but not only for the indigenous majority,
and starts to disembed the colonial (neo) liberal state. In Garcia Linera’s view,
the Constituent Assembly was essential in order to ‘anchor in enduring state institutions
and relations of command the new correlation of forces reached by the indigenous
popular movement in the 2000–2005 cycle of mobilisations’.[4] Without the new constitution, it would not
have been possible to reach the ‘point of bifurcation’, or the moment when the
crisis of the state would be resolved either through a restoration of the old
state power or through the consolidation of the new bloc of popular power, ‘by
an act of leadership, of hegemony in the Gramscian meaning of the word’.[5]

Today,
he claims, ‘the subjects of politics and the real institutions of power are now
found in the indigenous, plebeian arena’:

Today, to influence the state budget or to
know the government agenda, it does not help at all to rub shoulders with
senior officials of the IMF, the Inter-American Development Bank or US and
European embassies. Today the state power circuits pass through the debates and
decisions of indigenous, worker and neighbourhoods assemblies [6]

The
actions of the MAS in government have been rooted in the overriding prioritization of decolonization: whereas
before ‘indigenous people were condemned to be peasants, toilers, informal
artisans, porters or waiters, now they are ministers (both men and women),
deputies, senators, directors of public companies, constitution writers,
supreme court magistrates, governors, and president’.[7]

Economic
decolonization – breaking with the outward flow of the surplus – has been
advanced, he argues, through nationalization, foreign exchange policies and tax
policies governing remittances of earnings and profits. The leading example is
the government takes on oil and gas revenues from 27% to between 65% and 77%,
providing the material basis for economic sovereignty. The MAS is also seeking
to reorient Bolivia’s external economic relations, working for example through
the ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America) grouping of left-leaning
Latin American states, to increase regional economic links: ‘Let’s act as a
regional state with respect to utilization and global negotiation of the great
strategic wealth we possess (oil, minerals, lithium, water, agriculture, biodiversity,
light industry, a young and skilled workforce)’.[8]

In
the cultural field, the colonizing paradigm was first broken by the election of
an

indigenous
president, and is now being pursued through the implementation of the

principle
of a plurinational state throughout the state administration. In fields such
health care, indigenous traditional practices are being introduced alongside
Western medical practices.

Garcia
Linera defines the MAS program as a ‘post-neoliberal model’ and a
‘postcapitalist transition’. Currently,

the state is the main wealth generator in the
country. That wealth is not valorised as capital: it is redistributed
throughout society through bonuses, rents, direct social benefits to the population,
the freezing of utility rates and basic fuel prices, and subsidies to
agricultural production. We try to prioritise wealth as use value over exchange
value. In this regard, the state does not act as a collective capitalist in the
state-capitalist sense, but acts as a collective redistributor of wealth among
the working classes.[9]

The
government is supporting communitarian institutions, and initiating debate
around ‘the campesino and communitarian productive logic based on a type of
productive rationality that is locally sustainable with nature’ …. ‘as opposed
to the processes of depredation peculiar to the civilisation of surplus value’.[10]

Thus
today

the organisational forms of the contemporary
indigenous movement – communal, agrarian, and union – with their style of
assembly deliberation, traditional rotation of posts, and in some cases, common
control of means of production, are the centres of political decision making
and a good part of the economy in Bolivia.[11]

Garcia
Linera recognises though that any transformation away from capitalism will be a
long historical process, and sees the emergence of an ‘Andean capitalism’[12],inflected by the Bolivian indigenous context, as an initial step.

The
MAS hegemonic project, as presented by Garcia Linera, thus foregrounds
decolonization as an umbrella beneath which several elements can be brought
together – deepening democracy, redistributing wealth, supporting alternatives
to capitalist relations, ecological sustainability – in a way which can appeal
to a broad hegemonic bloc within Bolivian society.

What
are we to make of Garcia Linera’s formulations?

In
the first place, there have been concerted criticisms, mostly but not
exclusively from the left, which question whether the MAS programme has involved
the transformation and supersession of economic neoliberalism or in fact
represents a fundamental continuity with it.
For some, ‘the liberal capitalist model, albeit one slightly modified in
favour of national development, has survived. By Bolivian standards, it could
even be said to be thriving’ in a ‘reconstituted neoliberalism’.[13] From this perspective,
the Morales government is not implementing a counter-hegemonic project but
overseeing a passive revolution. Secondly, many would seriously question
whether the MAS government has in fact pursued anything like as coherent a
strategy as that which Garcia Linera suggests.[14]

It
is important however to recognize the importance of context. This is the global
South, a postcolonial and peripheral context, a country with a fragile and
externally-dependent economy and weak state. Bolivia is a country with a majority
indigenous population but which is socially polarised, especially around issues
of race. Decolonization is thus at the core of the MAS hegemonic strategy, and
the hegemonic bloc is built around the mobilization and empowerment of the
indigenous population, privileging race over class. Moreover, important
currents within and around the MAS government question Western concepts of
modernity, including left conceptions of social change and struggle, and
instead look back to indigenous social, economic and political forms.

It
is in this sense – rather than primarily in the sense of a rejection of
capitalism - that for some commentators this is a period of profound change,
the

‘crisis of one historical cycle and the
beginning of another signalled fundamentally by a hegemonic transformation, the
replacement of political elites, a new configuration of the state and mutation
of the relation between state and society’[15]

In
this perspective, the MAS government is the culmination of a centuries-long
historical struggle against colonialism and neo-colonialism.[16]

The
question, of course, is how the priority of decolonization interacts with other elements
in the MAS strategy, and how diverse and conflictive social interests – both
within and beyond the indigenous population - are reconciled within a hegemonic
bloc. In addressing this issue, it has been suggested that the period of MAS
government since 2005 has comprised three phases.

The
first was defined by political polarization between the Morales government and
the right wing ‘media luna’ opposition, and characterized by a war of position
conducted in parliament, the constitutional constituent assembly and on the
streets. The second phase, the ‘hegemonic moment of MAS’, followed the ratification
of the position of Morales as president in the recall referendum of 2008 and was
characterized by the defeat of the right. At this point, therefore, the MAS
project moves
decisively from oppositional to dominant status.

The
third and most recent phase however is characterized by splits in the hegemonic
bloc since 2010, exposing fault lines in the MAS project: between modernity and
tradition, between universal and
particular interests, between visions of development and progress versus those
of vivir bien and ecological
sustainability, and between the concentration of power versus decentralization.[17]

In
particular, this recent phase has seen the rise of tensions between the
conception of the MAS government as a government of the social movements driven
from the grassroots, and the development of a strong state, with centralized
state power as the driver of policy. A following post will explore these
tensions.

Mike Geddes is an
Associate in the School of Comparative American Studies, University of Warwick,
Coventry, UK

Notes

[1] This blog is derived from a longer
article: Mike Geddes (2014): The old is dying but the new is struggling to be
born: hegemonic contestation in Bolivia, Critical Policy Studies, DOI:
10.1080/19460171.2014.904645.